A social network service provides an online platform focused on building and reflecting social networks and relations among friends, family, and those who share interests. It enables users of the service to make their own communities in which to share ideas, activities, events, and interests, both within their individual networks and with the community at large. The social network service includes users who, via a representation of themselves (an “account”), interact with other users and a variety of additional services. Various forms of online community services can be considered social network services that tend to focus on more group-centered networking than individual-centered networking.
Social network services and online communities present relationships between users. The users can access services based on their presence in the social network. Users of the service are largely free-standing, opting into and controlling their memberships and affiliations with groups within the social network. This, however, does not provide any assurance to other users of the group or group organizer that an individual user is who he/she says he is. Similarly, there is no guarantee that an organization or a group in the social network is the actual entity that it claims to represent. Social network capabilities are needed to address these problems in order to provide trustworthiness within a social network.